Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/112

Rh our inquiry into limits enables us to answer this question with the definite discrimination required. This outcome shows us the narrow limits of evolution as a doctrine of unpretending science. Still more significantly, it brings out the unavoidable limits of evolution as a philosophy, as regards the origin of man and the nature of the eternal creative Power. In short, it teaches us that the answer to the question whether Christianity and evolution are compatible, turns wholly on the stretch that evolution has over existence, especially over human nature.

But it is time we all understood how finally at variance with the heart of Christian faith and hope is any doctrine of evolution that views the whole of human nature as the product of “continuous creation,” — as merely the last term in a process of transmissive causation. The product of such a process could not be morally free, nor, consequently, morally responsible. It must needs be merely a mass of “inherited tendency”; and, howsoever fair its effect might appear, no life of genuine dutifulness, no life of goodness freely chosen, could enter into its being. As a speculative possibility there may be ways of conceiving man thus “continuously created” and yet in such relations to the Creator as would provide for his immortality, in the sense merely of his everlasting duration; Pro-